


I'm the Bomb and I'm About to Blow Up

by raewise



Series: Kit Ashbourne [2]
Category: Fallout (Video Games), Fallout: New Vegas
Genre: Drug Addiction, F/M, Jealousy, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Time Skips, Very Brief Attempted Rape/Non-Con
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-04-24
Updated: 2016-04-24
Packaged: 2018-06-04 07:24:30
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,260
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6647980
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/raewise/pseuds/raewise
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>He asks her if she considers herself a soldier. She pauses for a moment, then says, “Soldiers sacrifice and die. I'm a freelancer.”</p>
            </blockquote>





	I'm the Bomb and I'm About to Blow Up

**Author's Note:**

> Hello! This fic is set in the same universe as my fic ["Five to One"](http://archiveofourown.org/works/6218275), which is Benny/Kit-focused, so if you're into that please check it out!!
> 
> Title from "The Bomb" by Pigeon John
> 
> Warnings are in the tags plus: Cussing, injuries, nightmares
> 
> EDIT 13/5/18: THIS FIC WILL BE UNDERGOING A RE-EDIT VERY SOON. This has always felt like the weakest installment in this series to me, and since this is when my love of KitBoone really took off I thought it deserves a refurbishment. Expect the new edit to appear somewhat soon.

The courier’s lips are cherry red, the colour of a bomb that'd just gone off. Her duster’s billowing behind her, scarf wrapped around her curly bob flapping against the wind. With the look and the name--Kit fuckin’ Ashbourne--she is a goddamn action hero. 

Kit’s a damn good shot, not as good as Boone but then again nobody is as good as Boone. And he doesn't consider himself a vain man. She has the kind of respect you can't buy, not from him. It’s the respect of a genuinely good soldier and a better woman.

When Boone wakes up from a nightmare, Kit always slips under his covers and puts his hand above her heart. She presses her mouth to his ear, letting her silky voice wash over him. Tears dry, and he lets himself enjoy the tickle of her curly hair against his bald scalp, the floral smell of her perfume.

The first time she kisses him she tastes like flat sarsparilla and Lucky Strikes. The first time they have sex she looks so much like an old-school pinup model--with her round breasts and thick thighs and soft stomach--he almost cries. Carla was built like a twig, and her hands were much softer than Kit’s. He tries not to think about his dead wife while his best friend (and, Christ, when did she become that?) performs some magic with her tongue.

\--

She comes home from the Sierra Madre with a rainbow of bruises and burns, a shellshocked look in her crystal blue eyes, and a tube of nude lipstick. When Veronica questions her, Kit grins and sighs longingly. “Met a girl. Had to leave her behind, but I managed to lift this off her before making my way back here.”

\--

She still wears his beret when they’re out in the field. The same beret he gave her after he blew Jeannie May’s brains out all over her. The red has faded from age, and it’s big enough on her head that she can tuck her hair inside it without getting her head compressed. It’s the same beret he wore at Bitter Springs as he slaughtered innocent children and families. The same beret he wore when he tracked down his wife, saw her in a slave collar and cuffs and shot her through the temple. There is so much guilt in the threads of that damn beret. But so much pride as well. He’s proud of Kit, proud of her helping hands and steady trigger finger. Proud of the solace he finds in those swinging hips. 

He asks her if she considers herself a soldier. She pauses for a moment, then says, “Soldiers sacrifice and die. I'm a freelancer.”

Boone supposes that’s a valid enough answer. He feels the same way sometimes.

\--

She likes the Aces Theatre. She likes the Lonesome Drifter’s guitar and Billy King’s quick wit. More than anything, though, she loves Bruce Isaac. Back in her hometown, New Reno, he was a headliner. She would sneak into the back of the club after running chems between rival families and lose herself to the swagger of his vocals. 

She's preening, pinching her cheeks and smudging red onto her lips. The wings of her eyeliner are sharper than knives. Despite her peacocking her hair is still the colour of wet sand, delicate nose still adorned with reddish-brown freckles (the colour of dried blood beneath fingernails--a sunset over the Colorado--bullet casings rusted over centuries), and there's still those premature wrinkles between her arched eyebrows.

“Sure you don’t want to come?” she asks him halfway out the door. Cass is eager to leave, already on her way to being drunk off her ass.

“Go ahead.”  _ Have fun _ , he thinks. 

He spends his evening cleaning his rifle, solvent making his fingers slick and stained yellow-orange. Raul’s tinkering with something on the kitchen table across from him, constantly looking over at him.

“What?” he finally barks, putting his cleaning rag down. 

Raul smiles, shrugging good-naturedly. “Nothing, nothing…” He puts his chin on top of his fist, smearing grease all over his face. “Does the boss know about your… feelings? She’s a bit of a commitment-phobe. Don’t want to see you getting hurt, my friend.”

Boone stands so quickly his chair’s knocked backwards. He snatches his rifle and goes to bed. 

He dozes for a few hours before Kit collapses on him in his bed, already drooling onto his chest. She’s snoring, but her eyes are still open a crack so Boone knows the courier isn't quite asleep, just teetering on that edge.

Boone runs his fingers through her hair, picking out tangles. His brain goes off on a tangent about what it would’ve been like if Carla was still alive, if they had a kid together. He still can’t imagine raising a child in this hellhole of a world. A full body shudder vibrates down his spine and into his toes. Kit groans on top of him and Boone forces himself to fall asleep.

\--

Kit could nail a target between the eyes from two miles, but with the bastard that shot her twice in the head on his knees in front of her she doesn’t shoot. Boone doesn’t understand their relationship. Benny is scum, absolute Bad News, and yet she looks at him like a starved man looks at a fucking sandwich. And Benny… he seems to care, in his weird way. He hasn’t tried to hurt her since Goodsprings, doesn’t touch her without her permission. Boone doesn’t like him, but he won’t take something that makes Kit happy away. 

Even if he wants to fill his mouth with lead.

\--

_ Christ in Heaven _ , her blood’s everywhere, and she’s screaming like a banshee. The veins in her neck are bulging beneath her skin, voice garbled from blood and saliva in her throat. Boone tilts her head forwards so she can puke her guts out all over the dirt. Arcade is at the Strip, so he’s on his own. With his minimal medical training. Shit.

There are a lot of things that can be said of Craig Boone, but disloyal isn’t one of them. 

He presses down on the wound. She was hit with a shotgun blast, and her torso is spraying blood all over his hands. He tries not to shake. 

She claws at him, tears streaming down her face. Boone takes a second to note that he’s never seen her cry before. Not when she killed her first civilian, not when that bastard Legionnaire had her hogtied and ripe for the taking (Boone missed the headshot on that one, just to watch him scream). 

He stops rummaging in her satchel when she stops making noise. She’s twitching all over, and the bleeding has slowed, but not stopped. Her eyes have rolled into the back of her skull, face paler than he’d ever seen it. 

“Kit,” he says to her in a quiet voice hardened around the edges. “Don’t go to sleep yet. Let me stitch you up.”

She grunts, but he accepts that as a decent enough response considering the situation. 

“Don’t die on me. Who’ll be my spotter then? Manny?” He makes a disgusted scoffing noise. It’s maybe not the best time for jokes, but he’s seen her try to cut tension in the same way before. He’s not half as charismatic as her, but he wants to try. 

He pulls out a stimpack, then another. And one more for good measure. Beforehand he shoots her up with Med-X, because he knows from experience that stimpacks pushing the pellets out from beneath your skin hurts like all Hell. Boone hopes he didn’t just make her OD, but he doesn’t have a lot of experience so what else is he supposed to do?

Kit’s fist takes a swing at his head when he leans over her, wiping the blood off her torso with his shirt. It doesn’t connect, but skims his ear and makes him yelp. 

He grabs her forcefully, hating the feeling that gives him. He doesn’t like the way she tries to buck him off; she’s scared of him. Whether or not she recognizes him doesn’t matter. He’s a threat to her, she thinks. But he grits his teeth and waits for her skin to knit itself together before she passes out. Then he lets go. Her wrists are bruised and he thinks he’s getting a migraine, but she’ll live.

Later, when she’s coming to and he’s debating whether or not he should waste a stimpack for his headache, she opens her mouth and tries for words. It takes her three tries. “How long?” she rasps.

“Three hours. You should go back to sleep.”

She squints at him over the little fire he put together while she was asleep. She’s wrapped up tightly in her duster, scarf bundled up beneath her head like a pillow. Kit sits up, supporting herself on her skinned elbows. 

“You okay?” she asks, not looking at him. He knows he’s still coated with a flaky layer of her blood. Not the prettiest thing to wake up to, he supposes.

“Yeah.” He doesn’t ask her in return. He knows what her answer will be. “Drink this,” he says as he passes her a bottle of purified water. She gulps it down greedily, then uses the last few drops to get some blood off of her mouth and chin. She just ends up smearing it all over.

“Hopefully we’ll get back to the Strip tomorrow. By noon, if possible. I could really use a bubble bath.” 

Boone doesn’t tell her she shouldn’t walk all that distance in her condition, he doesn’t say anything at all. She sees right through him.

“We can take the monorail.”

He grunts in recognition. He lies back on the dirt, looking up at the sky. Stars are coming out, blinking at the two of them. When Boone rolls over to face Kit, her kiss feels like clinging to copper wire, feeling that burst of heat and following numbness.

\--

The snake is cocky, all square-jawed and broad-shouldered. He touches Kit openly, and _she likes it_. She giggles into his naked collarbone and run her fingers through his dark hair. Boone has never been more aware of his own buzzed head.  
“If you fucking hurt her, your grey matter will be so unrecognizable it’ll look like bighorner shit.” 

Benny grins at him, and Boone wants nothing more than to put this sick dog out of its misery.

“Doubt the broad needs your help. Have you seen her?” He blows smoke in Boone’s face, leaning against the wall. He’s only half dressed, covered in hickeys and a thin sheen of sweat. “If she was unsure of our arrangement, she would’ve already tossed my rotting corpse into the Grand Canyon, soldier boy. And I don’t plan on hurting the lady unless she asks, so get that pretty little gun out of my face, dig?”

Boone watches as Benny goes back into Kit’s bedroom, is forced to look at his smirk as he closes the door right in his face.

\--

She tells him her middle name in the middle of the desert, sun beating down heavy on their backs. He just blew a gecko’s head off from across the valley and was lazily reloading his rifle when she said, “My name's Kit Eleanor Ashbourne. Sometimes I forget that I even have a middle name. It feels weird in my mouth. Before Mama died she told me it was a family name. Dunno who.” She kicks a rock and drags on her smoke. “I had a pretty shitty childhood, I guess. Reno is a shark’s town. Difficult for a kid growing up alone. Did you know I was addicted to Jet, once?”

There's dirt streaking Kit’s cheeks, her heavy black boots dusted brown from the sand.

“No.”

“Yeah. Kicked it maybe… five years ago? I keep thinking about the Fiends, how I could've ended up one of them if I didn't get my act together. Nobody misses a Fiend when they die. I didn't want to end up like that. So I picked everything up and skipped town. Took a job with the Mojave Express and, well, you know the rest.”

“Are you happy?” Boone finds himself asking, surprising himself.

“Happier than I knew possible. I have a good home, people who love me, enough caps to keep me stocked on ammo and Fancy Lads for the moment.”

“Benny, does he make you happy?”  _ God, Craig, shut the fuck up! _ he thinks.

“Baby, you jealous? I like Benny, sure, but who do I have at my side?  _ You _ , sweetheart. I… love you, Boone. I know I'm a sleaze but I  _ do _ care.” She touches the sleeve of his dirty white t-shirt. Her touch burns like hot earth on bare feet. “I trust you, and that means more to me than who's good at making me cum.” 

Despite himself, Boone smiles. “You make things easier to deal with. After Carla, life seemed real grey. Distant, like I was watching it happen to other people and I was just part of the scenery. You brought some colour back, purpose beyond revenge. Thanks for that. I really do appreciate it.”

Her blue eyes twinkle and red lips curl into a grin. Everything about her is bright and brilliant. 

“So, what do you say we give the geckos something to watch and we fuck on that nice, flat boulder over there?”

With a breathy laugh, Boone shakes his head but lets her drag him over to aforementioned rock.

**Author's Note:**

> [Buy me a coffee!](http://ko-fi.com/I3I59IAV)


End file.
